For decades, on the Fourth of July, Joe Torsella and his family performed the same patriotic ritual: reciting, in its entirety, the Declaration of Independence. At the time, Torsella was deep in his political career, a four decade-long journey that took him from Ed Rendell’s mayoral administration, to the helm of the National Constitution Center, to Pennsylvania State Treasurer — and he thought he understood the country’s revolutionary document.
Now, Torsella says: “I think I had my head up my ass. I appreciated the sweep of history, that it went beyond 1776, but I viewed it as this lovely artifact. What I didn’t get was how alive it is for the right now. Now I view it as empowering, potentially dangerous, very alive.”
Six years after losing his last election to Republican State Treasurer Stacy Garrity, Torsella — who sprinkled the opening words of the Constitution, “We The People,” into every speech — has turned his lifelong love for our country’s founding documents into (wait for it) a one-man play that the former politician will perform at this year’s Philadelphia Fringe Festival. And we are so here for it: Citizen Media Group CEO/President Larry Platt and Board Chair David Cohen will host a limited number of new or upgraded Citizen members at Torsella’s September 20 show, at 2pm, followed by a conversation with Platt, Cohen and Torsella. (Become a member here.)
To outside observers, the move seems like an unexpected shift for a 62-year-old man who spent his career in the political trenches. In fact, it’s a return for Torsella to his first love: Theater.
“I always had this bifurcated personality, where part of me was very drawn to the arts, part of me was very drawn to things civic,” Torsella says. “That existed, more or less, depending on the year and the month and the situation, in tension or in compatibility.”
Torsella’s acting debut was at age 13, with a small part in his Northeast Pennsylvania hometown’s robust community theater, and he says he was named “Most Artistic” by his high school classmates — one of whom was Nick Stuccio, eventual founder of Fringe Arts. After being rejected from Yale University’s theater program, he attended Penn, where he joined the all-male musical comic brigade, Mask & Wig.
Somewhere along the way, though, Torsella turned away from the stage and towards a different type of theater: Politics. He served briefly as Deputy Mayor for Policy and Planning under then-Mayor Ed Rendell, who in 1997 asked him to helm the National Constitution Center during its founding, and as Governor later appointed him as Pennsylvania Secretary of Education. Torsella also served as an Ambassador to the United Nations under President Obama. He ran for office three times: a brief run in the Democratic primary for Senate; a successful campaign for State Treasurer, a post he held for one term; and a losing campaign for the same post.
That final defeat, in 2020, forced Torsella to rethink how he wanted to spend the rest of his life. He’d always said, to family and friends, that one day he would go back to the theater. That day had come. He enrolled in a two-year New York acting conservatory, a 60-year-old among a sea of 20-somethings, which was as humbling and inspiring as you might imagine. He’s come out the other side with the same love for the country he served for 30 years, but a different perspective on how that service manifests.
“You flatter yourself or delude yourself in politics, that the kind of communication you do there is the only way. And I was guilty of that,” says Torsella, who just finished a run as Macbeth in a Bucks County theater. “But there are a whole lot of things that I could argue are more effectively communicating these days than we’re managing to do in politics, when we have a fairly urgent need for some fairly urgent communication. In my small way, I hope this play is one of those …
That’s incredibly grandiose, but there you go.”
Declaration: A Play in Five Moments
Grandiose or no, Torsella is onto something. Our politics have proven over the last several years that everything is story; whoever’s story you believe, or want to believe, is the one that takes hold. But we heed politicians’ stories at our peril. Increasingly, the folks in office — especially in D.C. — are out of touch with real Americans, their needs and wants. The stories they share are often Tweet-sized digs at people from the other party — or, in the case of our President, whatever he feels like spouting out, whether true or not.
The stories about who we are, what we need, how we relate to each other and to our humanity — about our hearts — are found where they always have been: books, songs, movies, plays. Torsella believes actors, by the very nature of inhabiting another character, have a “wonderful kind of aspirational empathy that we’d be better off if we had more of in politics.” Meanwhile, he’s found his new civilian voice as an actor.
Torsella created Declaration: A Play in Five Movements over the last 18 months, with a team of theater veterans including Executive Producer Stuccio; Producer Cara Morris; and Director Jennifer Monaco. It is about a character — Joe, a former state treasurer — who finds himself stripped of what once defined him and uses the Declaration of Independence to interrogate his life, discovering the power of the civic voice the document gives him, and all of us. It is also, as Torsella himself is, funny. “It’s asking people, including the character who is Joe, to hear the document differently, as a very specific and, hopefully, to people who haven’t heard it or read it or thought about it in this way, a startling indictment of what tyranny looks like, and a fairly uncompromising call about what our rights and obligations are in the face of that.”
The most famous words of the 250-year-old Declaration of Independence — “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” — are preamble to a list of 27 indictments against King George III. Those include obstructing the administering of justice, sending “swarms of officers” to harass our people, and exciting “domestic insurrection among us.”
Sound familiar? To Torsella, too, who says his play does not name President Trump, although his specter hovers over this political moment in America. “I hope I have created something that is of this moment, and I hope it causes people to leave the theater thinking they’d like to read the document again, that they feel differently about their citizenship,” he says. “But I also hope it’s become a theater piece that will outlast this moment, and will be relevant for different moments, of which I’m sure we’ll have plenty.”
In some ways, Torsella says, his play is inspired by other civic-minded productions that have had similar ambitions: Clifford Odets’ Waiting for Lefty, George Clooney’s Good Night and Good Luck, and perhaps most directly, Heidi Schreck’s one-woman play, What The Constitution Means to Me. Like Schrek’s piece, Declaration is mostly autobiographical, in as much as the character shares a background and a journey with Torsella. “There’s nothing in it that is not emotionally true or that I’ve invented out of whole cloth, but Joe has become his own character,” he says. “I hope that also helps people maybe see their own journey in a way.”
The power of the Declaration throughout our history has been touted by everyone from Abraham Lincoln — Torsella says he used it to “re-found us in the context of the Civil War” — to suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Martin Luther King, Jr. They used its words to say something about revolution, but also because of the power of “we” in “we hold these truths.” That speaks to Torsella, too, who is a communitarian at heart: His political philosophy is about finding connections among individuals, and between individuals and their society. (“That’s a winning strategy these days,” he says wryly.)
This was evident in 2020, when he lost his Treasurer seat to Republican Stacy Garrity, a 2026 gubernatorial candidate, the same year President Trump refused to acknowledge he lost to Biden. Torsella, on the other hand, released a concession video that is a master class in how to leave politics, even unwillingly, with grace.
“I don’t buy that people are as divided as some politicians wish we were,” Torsella said. “For all the selfishness in our politics, we the people have always been able to see the humanity in each other … We don’t just do this stuff because we’re nice people. We do it because it’s the only way this American experiment works … When I look around the country right now, I don’t just see a public health crisis or an economic crisis. I see an identity crisis. If that idea that we’re supposed to have each other’s backs continues to disappear from our political consciousness, then we cannot be, and will never be, the America we’ve always hoped we might become.”
He also wrote an open letter to his fellow state politicians with a Constitutional call to action. Today, he’s proud of how he spoke up for what’s right and important in his roles and in America, but wishes he’d done even more. “I should have done more than put out a beautiful thought,” he says. “I should have called out more strongly and categorically the capture by Wall Street of public investments. I wish I’d said something about what the political system we all tolerate does to people who are in it more clearly.”
With Declaration, a different Torsella in a different time has a new opportunity to be heard, and he wants to make it count. “I think what this play ultimately is, and what the character’s journey ultimately is, is a broader, hopefully more potent, maybe even a more dangerous understanding of the powers and obligation of citizenship,” Torsella say. “It’s about having a civic voice.”
Become a member, or upgrade an existing membership, of The Citizen Media Group today for free tickets and an after-show conversation with Torsella, Citizen Media Group CEO/President Larry Platt and Board Chair David Cohen on September 20, at 2pm, at the Arden Theatre, 62 N. 2nd Street. A limited number of members will be notified September 7 with an invitation to join. Sign up or upgrade your membership between August 24 and September 1 to qualify.
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